Saturday, July 23, 2016

#saveredhouse This weekend is the last chance to make the Kirklees Council know what do you think about their plans to shut Red House Museum. The Spenborough Guardian explains:

A last chance to share your views on the fate of two beloved museums with the council comes this weekend.
Consultation on Kirklees Council’s plan to shut Red House Museum in Gomersal and Dewsbury Museum in Crow Nest Park lasts until Sunday.
Under budget plans, the two sites could close and their collections be either transferred or stored.
A fightback by the community was launched, with nearly 1,500 people signing a petition to keep Red House open in one week. (...)An online survey which gives residents the chance to share their views can be filled in until July 24.

Q: Which other historical areas fascinate you and why?
A: I’m a medievalist through and through, but I’m also a 19th-century literary biographer with a particular and life-long passion for the Brontës. Where the 19th century scores over medieval history is in the level of individual literacy, which opens up a wholly different seam of personal responses to life and its struggles. Through reading diaries, letters and other autobiographical material you can get to the heart of a person in a way you simply can’t in earlier periods, which lack such resources. Without her extraordinary legacy of forthright, beautifully written and often deeply moving letters, what would we really know about Charlotte Brontë? Personally I find them even more powerful and illuminating than her novels. (...)Q: What can we expect from your talk at York?
A: The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë this year provides the ideal opportunity to re-examine the life and work of one of our most enduringly popular novelists. In what I hope will be an entertaining, but thought-provoking, discussion, I’ll be looking at how and why so many myths have grown up around Yorkshire’s most famous family and challenging the conventional view of the Brontë story. (Ellie Cawthorne)

This Belfast Telegraph columnist remembers how, when she was 17 she was more into Gothic than Joseph Conrad:

At the time I was in love with the Romantic and Gothic novelists. Books like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had fired my imagination at O-level and piqued my curiosity for the macabre and the extraordinary. (Frances Burscough)

We are not sure why the McAllen Monitor opens its review of the new Ghostbusters film with the 'poor, obscure, plain' Jane Eyre quote.

Taste of the wild
Upper Booth, Derbyshire
A stone barn on the way up to Kinder Scout above Upper Booth in the Peak District National Park
With no electrics at this site in the High Peak estate, there are few distractions from the rolling pastures of Austin(sic) and Brontë land.
It might be close-to-nature camping, but when you’re covered in mud after exploring the Pennine Way, Kinder Scout or Jacob’s Ladder, there’s a hot shower waiting. (Siobhan Warwicker)

Correo (Perú) lists women writers who used pseudonyms to get published. The Brontës are there. Just a pity that the portraits of Emily and Anne are wrong: